The Fall (2006) 4K restoration review: Tarsem Singh’s stunning film finally gets the upgrade it always deserved

It’d been ten years since I last saw Tarsem Singh’s epic fantasy The Fall, I realised as I walked into Thornbury Picture House’s gold-draped cinema on the evening of their showing.

Walking into that space on that unusually hot night, I was barely able to contain my excitement. Would the grand journey of an injured stuntman and his little friend still pack the emotional and visual wallop that it did ten years ago?

As the lights went down and the dramatic strings of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 in A major filled the small – but not uncomfortable – picture house, a flood of memories came back.

Very quickly, we are introduced to Lee Pace’s 1920s stuntman Roy Walker, who has injured himself badly on the set of an adventure film. He’s bedbound in a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where just a few wards down sits Alexandria, a little girl who has come to America with her refugee family and broken her arm while orange picking.

Walker is broken in more ways than one: not only has the stunt-gone-awry broken his legs, it’s broken his heart: his girlfriend decided he’s not worth the effort and run away with a famous actor. He finds a kindship with young Alexandria (Catinca Untaru, a tour de force), whom he starts telling stories to to both pass the time and gain her trust as he concocts a plan.

The story is told over many days, and centres the efforts of five heroes – the Black Bandit (Pace), the Indian (Jeetu Verma), Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and Luigi (Robin Smith) – who go on a grand quest to rescue a woman (Justine Waddell) and stop the evil Governor Odious.

The majority of the film then takes place inside the colourful mind of Alexandria, where fact and fiction are blended as she envisions the tale unfolding.

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Watch the trailer for The Fall:

The reason The Fall stayed in my mind for many years was its stunning visuals, so I’m happy to say that the new 4K re-release makes it look better than ever. The eye-popping colour grade takes the bloody reds, emerald greens, ocean blues and rich black and gold detail of the costumes (and real-life locations) and transforms them into a surreal dreamscape. It’s so vivid to a point where ‘vivid’ becomes an insufficient descriptor.

Costume designer Eiko Ishioka went to town with dressing the characters of The Fall, where each hero gets a unique look based on their ethnic heritage and reputation, all filtered through the imaginative mind of a child.

It’s immediately obvious to viewers that Roy Walker means to put a Native American in his story, calling him an ‘Indian’ and referencing wigwams, but in Alexandria’s version he becomes a South Asian Indian, because she recently met an Indian man in the orange fields. So, ‘the Indian’ gets a verdant turban and traditional warrior robes.

But my favourite of the costumes is Lady Evelyn’s lotus dress. Evelyn, being the woman in need of rescuing, first appears in the story wearing a gorgeous red silk dress, with a headpiece intended to look like a lotus flower.

The piece culminates in a veil that looks like an upside down fan, which Evelyn then parts into two pieces so that her face is revealed. No matter how many times I watch it, it still elicits a gasp from me. In 4K, the crispness of the image makes me eager to reach out and touch it.

The real-life locations I mentioned are a combination of places found across 24 countries, including the labyrinth Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, the Taj Mahal, the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, Turkey and the Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic.

To get to each of these locations, Singh ingeniously took advertising jobs in the relevant cities and filmed scenes for The Fall around that commercial work. This cut costs significantly for him, given that a film of that scale would have otherwise been prohibitively expensive to shoot.

Over the four years it took to make, the cast and crew travelled to Italy, France, India, Indonesia, Spain, Namibia, and China – to name just a few. The ‘Los Angeles Hospital’ was actually a fully functioning hospital in South Africa that happened to have the desired look that Singh wanted for a 1920s institution.

The travel was funded by Singh himself, and it pays off. Each of the locations becomes a signifier of where a child would imagine a hero would go, and simultaneously, because of the filters used in shooting, elicits a dream-like feeling that reminds us we are watching a fiction.

It’s also worth noting the lack of computer generated special effects in The Fall. The bulk of what you see is done practically – to the point of houses in Jodhpur being hand painted with blue paint on the day of shooting to achieve the unreal bright blue you see in the film.

Alongside the visual feast, The Fall contains some of the best child acting ever put to screen. A total natural, Catinca Untaru runs rings around Pace (figuratively and literally) by treating the tale as something totally real. Pace responds in kind, patiently improvising with Untaru as she ‘fumbles’ lines and mishears things he says – all unintentional flubs that remain in the film and thus transform their conversations to something incredibly real.

Their friendship feels totally authentic, and by the time the film’s emotional climax rolls around you’ll be so invested that your own grasp of reality and fiction will start to blur.

If you haven’t heard of The Fall until now, don’t be surprised. The film was a box office flop when it was originally released in 2008, after struggling to find distribution for two years (you’ll notice the Letterboxd date of release says 2006).

The Weinstein Company were initially set to distribute The Fall to cinemas in the United States. However, during a test screening, Harvey Weinstein reportedly walked out within 15 minutes, claiming he couldn’t understand the film’s plot.

The film did eventually come out on 9 May, 2008, thanks to Roadside Attractions, but failed commercially due to poor marketing and initial reviews that panned it for being too strange and confusing. Tarsem Singh relayed all of these events in a 2024 interview with Dazed.

It was a sad fate for work that, I think, deserves to be seen by every cinephile and storyteller in the world. Luckily, its fate has turned, and with the new release supported by MUBI in the US (and distributed by Umbrella Entertainment in Australia), people will finally have that chance.

Go and see The Fall, and you just might fall in love with film again.

The Fall (4K restoration) is now showing in select cinemas and streaming on MUBI, with a new BluRay available for purchase from Umbrella Entertainment on 7 May, 2025.